Description

Booby, Mama! is a one-act guerrilla theater script drafted in 1977 using the early twentieth-century surrealist methods for cutting up text and randomly putting the pieces together. The method elevated random chance to a major role in the creative process. Beat forerunner, the novelist William Burroughs, practiced this method to prominence. Hedwig Gorski began cutting up local newspapers in a Trenton attic along the New Jersey Delaware River after graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), the radical art school tucked away on the tip of the Canadian peninsula in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During that time period, performance art, personal videos, and installations began to dominate progressive aesthetics. Conceptual practices emphasized a mental aspect in these new artworks causing a revival of rebellious attitudes toward established art societies harkening the early twentieth-century avant-garde of Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism. These combinations of influences along with Jerzy Grotowski's theater transformed her from a painter to an artist poet. Tensions in the script arise from the copious prescriptive stage directions treating actors as if they were pedestrian dancers in contrast to the declarations of miasma then liberty by the main characters. Directors and producers are invited to interpret her experimental masterpiece from 1977, which pays homage to Dada forerunner, nineteenth-century artist and playwright Alfred Jarry, by later twentieth-century women, men, and transsexual characters.show more

About Hedwig Gorski

Hedwig Gorski is an artist poet and writer who evolved her literary projects from an education and practice in the visual arts. Her strong ties with Slavic writers such as Gombrowicz and Mayakovsky underscore her Polish American heritage. The poet-dramatist's major influences come from the avant-garde, experimental, and postmodern visual artists and writers. She considers herself a conceptual literary artist who believes any medium or style, scholarly, creative, or mundane, can become art. She has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Louisiana Media Arts Fellow as well as having received awards for poetry and drama with a career as the innovator of performance poetry in the 1980s. She published many books of poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction as well as producing audio recordings of poetry for radio broadcasts. She received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the age of 51.show more